China Discovers the Price of Global Power: Soldiers Returning in Caskets

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On his 22nd birthday, Corporal Li Lei sent a WeChat update from a United Nations compound in South Sudan. A firefight between government forces and rebels had erupted in the capital, Juba, and threatened to engulf the camp where his Chinese peacekeeping force was standing guard. His birthday wish, sent on the messaging app on July 8 with a picture of a blue U.N. helmet and helicopters overhead: “That all my comrades remain safe.” It was the last his friends and family back home heard from him. Two days later, a rocket-propelled grenade hit Cpl. Li’s armored vehicle, witnesses and the Chinese military said. He died two hours later. A colleague, Sgt. Yang Shupeng, died the next day.

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The pain was amplified by Cpl. Li’s youth and devotion to family. Born under China’s one-child-per-family policy, he grew up without siblings and, at 13, lost his father to cancer. He enlisted four years later to help support his mother.

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Young soldiers often come home in coffins, a heartbreaking reality for any nation that sends its military on missions abroad. It’s a familiar one to families in America and many other countries—and a new thing to many Chinese. The deaths represented China’s first combat troops killed in action since border clashes following its last war, with Vietnam in 1979, after which it espoused nonintervention in affairs abroad.The effect within China is not something we’ve seen before,” said Wang Hongyi, a former Chinese diplomat and peacekeeper at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The Juba casualties “had major repercussions—in government, in the military and in society.” When state television broadcast images of Chinese infantry under fire in Juba, struggling to save bleeding comrades, many viewers at home were stunned. Few in China understood the risks, including Cpl. Li’s family in Fuxing, a placid kiwi-farming village near the Tibetan plateau. His mother, Yang Bin, asked before he deployed if the work would be dangerous. “China is so powerful, who can bully us Chinese people?” her son replied, she recalled as she sat on a threadbare sofa in her rundown concrete home. “So our minds were set at ease.”

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Inside China’s government, differences have emerged about how to use the military overseas, said people familiar with the discussions. The prevailing view in the foreign ministry, they said, is that China should rapidly expand peacekeeping activities to show global leadership, as Mr. Xi demands. Many military commanders, they said, by contrast want to move more slowly, conscious of their troops’ lack of experience and sensitive to domestic and international criticism.

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The Chinese military dispatched an ambulance. Inside it, a Chinese soldier tried to keep Cpl. Li conscious. “Leilei hold on, hold on,” the soldier recalled saying in a television interview. Cpl. Li was pronounced dead at 8:43 p.m.

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The military delivered his belongings, most of which sit in canvas bags in his room—bedding, toiletries, a few clothes. There is also his diary. An entry reads: “If one day I’m gone, don’t miss me. I chose this. I have no regrets.”

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